heads ups to those who want a deal

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raggie33

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biglots has a nice printer for photos for 40 bucks .it aint linux friendly though but it produces some great 4x6 photos.look like the real thing it alos has a lcd screen and card reader .it was only 40 bucks .well worth it if ya ask me .
 

raggie33

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opps i forgot to say it does full size pics to the size of a reg pieace a paer and its a canon 6220d
 

Fallingwater

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After years of clogged heads, cleaning cycles, refills and wasted ink, I'm done with inkjet printers. They've had more than their fair chance to impress me, and every single one I've tried has utterly failed to do so.

There's little point in having great quality when you have to fight it for two hours just to get it to spit ink on the paper without white lines all over the place.

I now own a cheap b/w laser printer that'll print fine even if I leave it off for months. Should I ever need color prints I'll buy a cheap color laser printer (they're about €150 now).

</rant>
 

eluminator

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After years of clogged heads, cleaning cycles, refills and wasted ink, I'm done with inkjet printers

Which brands did you try?

My cheap Epson would get clogged heads often so I just bought an HP as a replacement. My sister has an HP and it never seems to get clogged heads.
 

PhantomPhoton

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HPs have always done okay for me. However I don't do a whole lot of printing, so high volume may be different.
The odd thing is that it has always been cheaper to buy a whole new cheap printer than to buy replacement Black & Color ink cartridges. Idiotic IMO the cost of new cartridges.
 

geepondy

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That is a superb deal on the printer. Regarding the cost of replacing a printer instead of buying ink, don't most printers only come with small capacity "starter" cartridges? I am looking at what's included from the Canon web site and it says the 6220D comes with "FINE" Cartridges: CL-51 Color, CL-52 Photo. Not sure if these are full capacity cartridges or not. Also regarding color laser vs. color inkjet, I can say our several thousand dollar Ricoh office printer will not produce color photos that even begin to rival inexpensive inkjets.

Because of the high cost of OEM ink and I won't experiment with non OEM ink, I try to utilize Costco as much as I can for photo printing especially the larger prints.
 

greenstuffs

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I have found out the hard way that it is always easier and cheaper to print at walmart with their digital kiosk than at home i'm done with home photography not really practical buying the ubber expensive paper and ink plus all the BS the ink manufacturer do to their cartridges such as limiting the number of print per cartridge or having them chipped to avoid the refills by environmental conscious users EPSON, HP are the evil of the inkjet industry :shakehead :thumbsdow:thumbsdow:thumbsdow.
 

raggie33

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it really is a great printer im pretty sure there full capacity cartridges
 

Fallingwater

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Which brands did you try?
My cheap Epson would get clogged heads often so I just bought an HP as a replacement. My sister has an HP and it never seems to get clogged heads.
I owned a Lexmark printer that constantly had the clogging problem. Lexmarks have on-cartridge heads, so replacing the cartridge cured the problem, but I ended up with many cartridges that contained perfectly good ink but were unable to squirt it on the page as the head was clogged beyond repair.

I then offloaded the Lexmark to a friend and got an Epson. Bad idea. That was even worse, in that it was clogging constantly but the heads were non-replaceable. After months of cursing I finally dumped it in the garage (and later tore it apart and salvaged a lot of electronic components) and had a friend give me a Xerox she wasn't using.
That worked a bit better, but it didn't have replaceable heads either, so it too eventually succumbed to the clogging problem despite all my attempts to save it by doing repeated cleaning cycles with various cleaning/unclogging fluids in place of ink.

I then got the laser printer and I haven't looked back. No liquids to spill, no clogging, no white lines... I feel for people still stuck with inkjets.

By the way, not two months ago I had to fight another Epson, my girlfriend's, for the same old problem. After yet more cursing I solved the problem by giving her another laser printer from my dad's office (it wasn't being used by anyone).
She's happy she can print whenever she wants, and I'm happy I don't have to get ink all over my hands every week.

Oh, and I also scrounged up an old dot-matrix printer at a garage sale. Noisy as hell and slow, but likely to last a hundred years and the ink is dirt cheap. It's now my backup printer, should the laser ever fail.

The odd thing is that it has always been cheaper to buy a whole new cheap printer than to buy replacement Black & Color ink cartridges. Idiotic IMO the cost of new cartridges.
New printers often come with reduced size cartridges.

There are refill kits that allow you to re-use your depleted cartridges. Millilitre per millilitre those those cost many, many times less than the original, clone or even factory-refilled cartridges.
Only problem is, refilling is messy...
Oh, and it should be done on replaceable-head printers only. Refilled cartridges might end up with impurities in them that could clog or damage the print head. No big deal if you can replace it, big frigging deal if replacing the head means replacing the whole printer.
 

Nitroz

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For printing photos I rely on shutterfly. Nice quality and cheap.


Otherwise I print on a dinosaur HP laserjet 4 plus, a serious workhorse.
 

FlashKat

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HP makes the best inkjet printers. Make sure you use only original cartridges as I found out the cheap replacements do not work correctly. I worked at place that only bought Epson...CLOG,CLOG,CLOG. He told me clean the print head...clean the print head and by that time you run out of ink. He was an idiot.
Which brands did you try?

My cheap Epson would get clogged heads often so I just bought an HP as a replacement. My sister has an HP and it never seems to get clogged heads.
 

geepondy

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The beauty of HP's is that the printheads used to be in the cartridge. You bought a new cartridge, you got a new printhead. But now I see they have gone to individual ink containers on at least some of their printers so wonder if it's still true about the printheads being contained in the cartridge. I would guess not.
 

eluminator

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They are still in the cartridge on my new Photosmart d5160. I just got this one for $90 with free shipping from NewEgg. This is the HP printer that can print on CDs. It has the same cartridge scheme as the venerable 7350 although the cartridges have different model numbers.

I haven't used it much but in some ways it is superior to the old one.

There is one difference I find interesting but I don't know what it signifies. The old one suggested you could swap the second cartridge between the black cartridge and the photo cartridge. It came with a plastic clip to put on the cartridge you removed from the printer to keep the head from drying out. This is the printer my sister uses and it's never had a cartridge swap. Only the photo cartridge has ever been used.

My new printer also allows the use of either the black cartridge or the photo cartridge as the second cartridge. But it doesn't come with the plastic clip and I saw no suggestion that you might want to swap back and forth.

It came with the black cartridge. I printed a sample photo that came with the software. The photo looks very good to my eyes. Maybe HP selected the sample photos to print well with the black cartridge. I don't print many photos and I see no reason to buy the photo cartridge at this time.
 
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Norm

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After years of clogged heads, cleaning cycles, refills and wasted ink, I'm done with inkjet printers.

</rant>
+1, I now have a cheap HP laser Jet that prints perfectly every time in black and white, if I want to print photos there are plenty of places down town.
Norm
 
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